The World According to GIMP

Friday May 28th 2010 by Paul Ferrill

Share:

Open source image editing software GIMP is a leader in its field, yet it has competitors.

High-end graphics editing in the commercial world has been
defined by Adobe's Photoshop. It is so dominant and so prevalent that the name
is frequently used as a verb, as in the line from the movie Cheaper by the
Dozen "We'll photoshop her in later." In the free and open source world the
standard of comparison is GIMP. GIMP stands for GNU Image Manipulation
Program and was first released in January of 1996. The latest stable release is
version 2.6. Many people add "The" in front of GIMP when referring to the
program since they think it reads better, but officially it is just GIMP. (You don't say "The Photoshop", do you?)

Both Photoshop and GIMP are categorized as raster
graphics editors. A raster graphics image is essentially an n by m array of
pixels where n and m are the dimensions of the image. Each pixel represents a
color and typically consists of three or four components. Traditional display
systems use the three base colors of red, green and blue (RGB) to create a
specific color. The print industry has traditionally used the four colors cyan,
magenta, yellow and black (CMYK) for their purposes.

Understanding the image and color basics and the end product
helps when evaluating software. GIMP really shines when it comes to
enhancing or retouching digital photos. While it can be used for other tasks, it
has come to be the open source tool of choice for professional photography
enhancement. Vector graphics are a whole different story. Images based on
vector graphics use geometric primitives such as curves, lines, points and
polygons as the basic building blocks. In the rest of this article we'll look
at the state of GIMP along with other tools for working with vector
graphics-based images.